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Nigam Shah: Artificial intelligence transforms health care

Data analytics is revolutionizing health care — quietly, pervasively and in some surprising ways.

How could machine learning enable hospitals and doctors to make more informed decisions and improve care? | Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

How could machine learning enable hospitals and doctors to make more informed decisions and improve care? | Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

In hospitals across the world, the unmet need for end-of-life palliative care threatens to overwhelm the few doctors who are equipped to adequately provide counseling that can help patients die on their own terms. There are just too many patients and too few doctors.

Stanford’s Nigam Shah, an expert in medical informatics, says that such scenarios may soon become a thing of the past. Artificial intelligence, founded on tens-of-thousands of data points gathered from millions of patients, is flipping such age-old scripts to change how and with whom care conversations happen. It is but one example of the many ways AI is reshaping medicine, but these major advances are not without ethical concerns, Shah says.

Join host Russ Altman and Nigam Shah for an in-depth look at the growing influence of “data-driven medicine.”

You can listen to the Future of Everything on iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.

Read more about Shah’s work to leverage machine learning to bring more humanity to health care here.

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